56778we Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder

Jean Stein
We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder

Author(s): Richard Powers
Source: Grand Street, No. 38 (1991), pp. 182-203
Published by: Jean Stein
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25007467
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00~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
RICHIARD POWERS
We Are Climbin
Jacobs Ladder
Fo m the window of a wandering Greyhound, Stuart

Ressler gets his first look at the unmistakable I-state
phenotype: the unvarying horizon, Siberian grain
wastes, endless acres of bread in embryo call to him like
home. Schooled in the reductionist's golden rule, he sees in this
Occam's razor-edge of emptiness a place at last vacant enough
to provide the perfect control, a vast mat of maize and peas,
Mendel's recovered Eden. Green at twenty-five, with Ph.D., he
leaves the lab to enter the literal field.
The tedious bus haul catches him up on the literature. The
Journal of Molecular Biology takes him into Indiana, where
he acquires a seatmate whose disease of choice, obesity, spills
over the armrest into Ressler's seat. When Ressler takes up the
National Academy Proceedings, the huge stranger lets loose on
the perils of reading. "My father could put away a Zane Grey in
one afternoon, and it got him nowhere. You'd be wise to go easy
on it." Ressler nods and twists his lips, but his seatmate persists.
"What do?"
Quick decoding eliminates "Gesundheit" as an appropriate
response. "I'm a geneticist."
"You fix women trouble? What I wouldn't do to trade places
with you. Oh brother. What I wouldn't do."
183
RICHARD POWERS
Fortune extracts the man at Indianapolis, a

of companionship passes. When he is safely into
hour from his new life, organics lays a last ambu
tortoises possessed by mass instinct crawls acros
in the twilight. Bottlenecked cars take turns gun
over the shells. The tortoise-trickle doesn't even
stares out the rear window as long as he can st
hundred yards, the insane persistence of the p
in fascinated disgust.
But Chelonia has nothing over primates. A
brings Ressler out here. Four years before,
year grad stormed into his dorm room waving
Watson-Crick article in Nature. The awesome a
helix-with its seductive suggestion of encoded
assembling an entire organism-spread before h
the American wilderness. The next day, he droppe
investment in biophysiology to rush the frontier
He pointed out to his astonished advisor ho
preparation he already had for the curriculum
much carried over into molecular. The scale c
a snap. Besides, all significant breakthroughs
novices free from vested interests. In six month
precocity, he'd made believers of everyone. Re
singled him out, recruiting him even as he put th
his thesis. Guided by heroic impatience, he cho
at Champaign-Urbana. Illinois could get him start
The game was afoot; a lab's a lab so long as it's an
induction, and technique could put even an I-stat
At twenty-five with no major contributions y
the gun. Miescher was twenty-five when he
ninety years before. Watson was twenty-four. If
of breakthrough don't show by thirty, forget it
lab coat, get an industry job. Research-in A
is no country for old men. Sure, his dissertati
tour de force, but it just juggled ideas evident to
attention. Now he must mint, in his new lab
currency.
He acclimates instantly to the box houses, orthogonal blocks,
and infinite corn-parallel plowcuts running to the horizon.
184
WE ARE CLIMBING JACOB'S LADDER
Stagnant backwaters are the most fecund.

supply of pipettes and a place to spread h
off the bus into the greasy station, he accr
shoos off the soliciting cab, walks to campu
discoveries are made on foot. The squares of
bear ingenious names: numbers, states, pre
trees slaughtered to make way for them. S
white wood houses, diners, five-and-dimes.
Pentecostal finger at the nimbus laid over it
postboard asking, "Can the Guests Morn Wh
Be With Them?," the u deleted in point mu
lining each street seem so many complementar
pairs-the fastest-breaking metaphor of the
Ressler forgets the seaboard, the flattened
his childhood. He settles into this emptiness
bacterium in the belly of his host.
On campus, a superannuated department s
ing fruit flies scrapes him up a place in the ol
reprieved from destruction until veterans sto
school on the GI Bill. Stuart, who missed th
enough years to think that GI Bills come from
vices rendered, also scabbed out of Korea on di
ral. His thesis, a magic bullet as explosive as any
him into another campaign. Military digs, then
carious enlistment. He takes possession of on
single-story, tar-paper shack in a shanty called
He delights in discovering that his cell number
his precise locus within the village.
Cursory inspection turns up a ratty bunk, a
a black-and-white print of James Dean with
wheel, and a box of cereal with both flakes and
devoured by red ants. He needs nothing mor
worldly goods: a tartan suitcase of second-h
tote bag crammed with journals. Social rounds
perfunctory trip to the convenience grocery,
barracks for a week. Days he toys with the cod
evenings he sits on a lawn chair staring at t
shelter signs plastered over the stadium acr
dinner, tomato juice without gin-alcohol is a
185
RICHARD POWERS
He remains horizontal for days, boning up

problem, resisting the temptation to indulge
cracking. He must consolidate, gather strength,
assemble the tools, await, without expecting, the
that rare, most skittish creature. But before it
outside world flank-attacks him through the
appears in his box, his first communique since hi
Dear St u,lJuly 16, 195

Heard you're in town and hope you're not w
official commencement of the fellowship to drop
use you in the Blue Sky sessions if nowhere else. N
much biology at the moment; too much excitement
Right now we're all thinking linguistics. Oh for a s
By the way, Charlene and I are having the team ove
and cards or something next Thursday. Do com
the get-together in your honor, if that's what it ta
Yours,
Karl Ulrich
P.S. Review Adv Biol 4:23 if you haven't done so recently, and
let me know Thursday if you think Gamow's right in discarding
the diamond code. I never liked the layout: too pretty. But too
convenient if the whole pattern just coiled up and blew away.
Ressler has met his new boss only through the journals.
Prolific, the man is to trees what Bill Cody was to buffalo.
Ulrich, at fifty-two (Ressler's age transposed), is Illinois's grand
old molecular man and the guiding spirit behind Cyfer, the
mixed team of microbiologists, chemists, and geneticists who
induct Ressler as new recruit. Ressler tracks the article down
in the university library. The stacks, among the largest in the
country, also bear the ubiquitous orange-and-black civil-defense
pie wedges. He doubts that four floors of masonry would survive
an airburst. And using the library as a fallout shelter until the
renovated landscape returned to safe levels of radiation would
require keeping survivors alive for weeks on cellulose alone.
Nevertheless, this homage to Dewey Decimal is the most
impressive monument America's breadbasket has yet shown
him. Several million volumes colonize ten floors of catwalks
186
and twisting alleys. If the stink of binding paste did

Ressler would go AWOL from the barracks and set
pieces of luggage here. A sadly vindicating tour rev
untouched since Henry James died. Humanities have c
into the terminally curatorial, forsaking claim to kno
cytotropic sixth sense, Ressler finds his niche-to-be,
away in a grotto deep in the spelunkers' recesses. Thi
branch of a specialized discipline, barely extant a d
now rates several shelves, swelling by the hour.
At any other time, he'd be hopelessly waylaid by
employment lists, turn-of-the-century political tract
year-old sets of symphony programs. This comprehen
striving for isomorphy with the outside world, pr
browser's awe. But commissioned, Stuart goes straigh
get periodical. He's read Gamnow on the code-one o
formal attacks on how DNA might imbed protein-plan
review the physicist's retraction; it's likely to be of
Ulrich's soiree than the latest Fats Domino. Advanc
4:23 slips off the shelf suspiciously, plops open to th
question, where a penciled scrawl near the title reads
JHB SZI HVA OLP GVX IKZ XHO DBN ZRU ALW WKH TVI H
EP
His brain stem throbs with the lure of this adept's spo
text trapped in nonsense, tapping impulses fiercer than t
urge to pile up cars or cure the forbidding lonelines
women. The sanctioned desires of twenty-five-warm bre
and cold chrome-are mere substitutes, garbled misreadin
of the real pull. All longing converges on this mystery,
unraveling of secret spaces, the suggestion that the wor
valence lies just behind a scrambled facade. Cryptogra
alone reaches beneath the cheat of surfaces. This puzz
clearly planted for his benefit-this chase, this unscrambli
waiting, working, worrying the breath-burst moment wh
irrefutable plaintext explanation descends: this (the cadence
his thought straying dangerously close to Protestant hymnod
is the reason why awareness itself evolved out of inert earth.
Experiment per se has never carried any special appeal; rar
187
RICHARD POWERS
steak aside, Ressler has never enjoyed cutting i

higher than Anura. But naming the transaction:
addiction. He sets to work on the pencil smud
closing, sole duple: perhaps the initials of his a
tries a few translations before hitting a simple r
is a jump of five letters; E to K, a jump of six. A
substitution cipher-a reasonable, reversible gar
Seven to the final R yields Y Eight to the S, go
horn, arrives at A. The last triplet comes out "da
rest is brute counting. Soon the shell cracks an
through:
IFY OUC ANR EAD THI STH ENT HEP ART YIS REA LLY WED NES DAY
KU
A clear return to native tongue. Grouping by three

Ulrich's hat-tip to the prevailing idea that the unit in the g
code is a triplet of bases. Regrouping reveals all.
Ressler passes the rite of hidden passages, wins his
glimpse of the new boss. The path from discovery to tinker
inspiration to solution takes place outside time. Returning
deck entrance, he discovers that he has narrowly missed b
locked in the stacks overnight. Only when he is safely ba
the barracks, flat out on the bunk in K-53-C, sipping tom
and savoring his victory, does he realize that he's forgott
glance at the article Dr. Ulrich asked him to review.
Stuart arrives at the Ulrich doorstoop on the rev
Wednesday, groomed for the occasion. The chief usher
in to the party with a "Good job." Ressler, last to a
uncomfortable in a newly purchased suit, presents his hos
a box of chocolates filled with greenish fungi. Suit and gi
both miscalculations; soon he'll be unable to go out in publ
all, so completely has he botched the social code in his has
crack the genetic.
He makes the rounds, meets his labmates. Tooney B
a youthful forty, is at the piano doing a terrifyingly
tempo cover of "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." Onl
missed the point: "Potato, potato, tomato, tomato," each
pronounced exactly the same. A gracious woman do
188
WE ARE CLIMBING JA COB'S LADDER
uncanny Eleanor Roosevelt impersonation, Dr

stands by in great pain, waiting for the promise
to come. Her accent reveals her as one of those
Europeans lured away from the Russians in '4
and cash. Judging by Dr. Botkin's bearing, th
toughening purgatory. She says as much in her
declaring with the tact of convoluted syntax th
that enabled Beethoven's Diabelli apotheosis h
instrument to her until a few moments before. R
nary a clue.
Joe Lovering sits on a sofa noisily denying
or has ever been a member of this or any
Jeanette Koss, both near thirty, discuss some
that Ressler lost track of in grad school. Dan
senior Cyfer member with Ulrich and Botkin, si
his head wrapped in Pyrex eyeglasses, watchin
set broadcast Gary Moore's "I've Got a Secret
interrupted by a news flash: scientists have succ
today's modern aspirin: fast, faster, fastest, th
gastrointestinal LeMans. "Last year's aspirin
headache . . ." Woytowich tells Ressler the pa
by marrying the mother of his father's second w
his own grandpa.
How can so human a collection hope to pen
blueprint? The code must certainly be more ing
crew, its proud creation. Ressler knows Cyfer
collective intelligence from their published t
needs them, their specific expertise in cytology
ontogeny. Yet they sing, watch prime time
Incredible comedown, awful circularity: no one
ourselves but us.
The welcome-aboard party-easily his most
evening out since the prom-leaves Ressler
purgative. He makes his first visit downtown sin
in. There he indulges in an act against type by bu
Spending money has never been a problem; h
one to form emotional bonds with crinkled, sept
paper. But since his late teens he's never owned
than he could carry out of the country on shor
189
RICHARD POWERS
in less than a month, he's already saddled hims

shelves, even a chicken-wire sculpture that cha
a chair.
He buys a record player that folds up into a box with a
handle, its color a pink that has been coaxed out of the spectrum
by suspect means. He is sold by a matching pink polyethylene
ballerina that snaps onto the spindle and pirouettes slavishly at
78, 45, 331/3, and-whatever happened to 16?-16. Amusical,
he inherited what is physiologically referred to as a tin ear.
His father carried the tone-deaf gene, forever going about
the house delivering a toneless version of "Get Out and Get
Under." A deeper discomfort with harmony leaves Ressler not
only ignorant of music but deeply distrustful of it. Pitch-writing
is a language obscure, amorphous, ambiguous-a dialect just
beyond paraphrase. Fast and loud is more exciting than slow
and quiet. The rest is silence.
He needs, without knowing it, those old Renaissance formu
las equating C-sharp minor with longing, sudden modulation to
E with a glimpse of heaven. How dare an obnoxious greaser four
years younger than he turn the Civil War tune "Aura Lee" into
the hit-parade standard "Love Me Tender," without a word of
concern for the underpinning chordal message? Either this lan
guage has no content, or tonal tastes have festered for 11 5 years.
Neither prospect is palatable.
He has trouble selecting tunes to keep the ballerina dancing,
and Olga herself remains noncommittal. At length, he grabs
an anthology called Summer Slumber Party, the bobby-soxer
behind the pillow, center cover, reminding him of a woman he
dated in college. With the assistance of an informed sales clerk,
he buys two other primers: Britten's Young Person's Guide to
the Orchestra and Leitmotifs from Wagner's "Ring. " The latter,
still politically suspect, appeals to him because of the liner
description: a story told in a book-code of memorable riffs. One
of these discs might contain his tonal Rosetta. To round out his
disc library, in the spirit of Separate Can Never Be Equal, and
knowing the tunes from his father, he buys an album of spirituals
by Paul Robeson.
A summer night, the last before his marriage to experiment,
and Ressler spends the dark, warm hours soaking in the
190
evangelical minister's voice spreading spirituals fr

onto Stadium Terrace's lawn. Robeson sings, "Som
causes me to wonder. Ah, sometimes." The sound
Ressler, slack in his lawn chair. The waves continue e
feet per second, arriving in D.C. later that evening. H
phrase knock at John Foster Dulles's window as the s
state prepares for bed. Dulles curses, shouts for this b
leave him be. He's promised to return 01' Man River'
as soon as Robeson returns the 1952 International
Prize. Last year Dulles told a Life reporter that a m
to go all the way to the brink is lost. Brinkmanship
going word. Dulles, hands full with the Suez and Syria
already destined for Lebanon, shaken by the runaway
singing "Jordan River chilly and cold," shouts out th
of the State Department at Ressler to turn the volum
have a little respect, forgetting, under stress of the b
democracy is the privilege of being unable to escap
man's freedom of speakers.
Ressler, a thousand miles west, listens to the bla
on to sing, in resonant bass, the great ascent up Jaco
Every rung-now the steps of the four nucleoti
spiral DNA staircase-goes higher and higher. On th
barracks lawn, gathering strength for the work h
world, he feels his peace turn to a sadness so over
that, before he can interpret it, tears seep out h
underground springs. Avuncular defective lachrymal g
this moment masked, flushed by the deep voice, the s
the tune, the hopeless hope of words in a world wher
declare themselves safe radiation havens, or just this
night in a featureless town. Spontaneous seep of gland
capable of grabbing the next rung while simultaneou
for the beloved brink. Or purely somatic epiphen
Robeson hits a note, springs a sequence that trigg
everything else lies outside measure. Deeply enfolded
attaches to the night's lateness, and suddenly the son
Ah! sometimes it causes me to wonder. Sometimes. Th
lawn, on the eve of uncovering the precise, testable ta
change the way life conceives itself, he feels the firs
of music, his own pitiful compulsion for forward m
191
RICHARD POWERS
insistence that we sing ourselves into a furt

while the runaway slave's son intones:
We are climbing Jacob's ladder
We're soldiers of the Cross.
Rearguard, he runs through the lexical comb

reserves for that five-letter word: cross st
Ranvier's cross, crossbreed, cross-firing, cro
matching, sensory crossway.
Every rung goes higher and higher
We're soldiers of the Cross.
To this cross list, he adds the crucial test

way to tell how he and the bass are relat
miscegenation linking them. Then he' hits o
the label for the spiritual's crucifix, the dee
Robeson soldiers under. Anatomical term: crux
I f the great debate of the '40s raged ove

molecule carried hereditary material, and if
the fight was over nucleic acid structure, t
tention of 1957 is the one Ressler walks into o
the lab. A working relationship with microorg
bathe this morning before leaving the barrac
dunking gives him time for undirected reflecti
his best insights arrive in proximity to porcela
hair before setting off is time lost to superflu
puts him into the scientific cross hairs.
While he unpacks his glassware and sets up a
room, Jeanette Koss passes his counter and lay
on his. The contact startles Stuart; real skin ru
his arm-so long has he been without-cuts lik
Dr. Koss whispers, "If Blake or Lovering catch
this, your year is ruined."
In the same soft confidence, she spells out
her soiree sparring partner, and Blake, the pia
192
Gershwinning ways, are locked in dispute ab

of going outside with a wet head. The two s
commensurate views on the coding problem. Bu
they are bitterly bipolar. Blake devotes himself
destruction of the old wives' hypothesis linking
season for viruses. For the last month he's im
twice daily before going outside. Lovering, on t
not only maintains bone-dry hair at all times b
July, keeps up a steady regimen of preventive
Koss explains, releasing Ressler from her touc
control group. If they catch you like this, you'
To date, he's lain low in the exchange between
Niki and Ike. But his colleagues in decipherin
the Cold War home. Best avoid getting caugh
Ressler thanks Dr. Koss for the caveat, but that
She produces a supply-room towel, and insists o
head in the fabric. Before he collects the pres
object, she is rubbing him gently but briskly
nape of neck. Buried memory shoots up throu
mother preparing him for church, a wedding
wince of somatic recall-thumb moistened wit
raw the skin behind his ears. The woman-m
come-pinches his head into sweet pain. Koss
his hair, combs it, smiles, and crosses the room
work with the vernier scales. In a minute, it's a
of the ordinary has happened; in two, Ressler's
contact.
Ulrich's note was right; the lab is between measurements.
The group is on extended leave from titrations, slide-stains,
partition chromatography. They are after a transcription axiom.
For the link between nucleotide sequences and protein synthesis
to be determined experimentally, Cyfer must first play with
shape, suspected inner symmetries. They are up against not so
much the chemistry of biology as the grammar of it. Molecular
genetics has a first shot at bridging the gap, grounding organic
complexity in fundamental arithmetic. Ulrich has called an
informal moratorium to assimilate the lightning experimental
results of recent months and formalize Cyfer's understanding of
the symbolic logic that genetics has stumbled on. A time for pure
193
RICHARD POWERS
speculation. Ressler's first day at school is a day to i

old arbiter and sworn enemy of experiment: huma
Cyfer-for Cytology Ferment, although they are
in the wine business-is the catchiest name in the h
since Bill Haley and the Comets. The sobriquet eve
an edge with grants. But the name stands for a
of personalities. Botkin bicycles up on a machine t
on prewar pilgrimages to Bayreuth. Blake enters
patting empty pockets everywhere on his person
into the department parking lot in a VW bearing the p
When all are present and accounted for, Ressler joi
Blue Sky session. The informal brainstorming ge
everyone tossing out abstracts of articles and vo
review others for the following week. Soon talk
topics that leave them sounding more like a clutch
From their predecessors-pylons in the vast,
suspension bridge between the inanimate atom a
ecoweb-Cyfer inherits a list of numbers it must
a magic square. An alphabet of four nucleotide
grouped into trinities, must produce a vocabulary
different words. These three-letter words spell
miracle-sentences translated into a tongue of tw
acid actants. Cyfer shoots the blue, welding to
incunabula into a new gnosticism.
In a few minutes Lovering races from embracing
fad in punctuation to discarding it wholesale in favo
improved flyer. Woytowich, incredibly, is the l
guard to refuse the Watson-Crick model. His st
comments reject the helix. He declares, in a fo
tailored to get on everyone's nerves, "Too simple t
is." Whenever anyone says anything remotely
shakes his head sadly and says, "We're overlooki
here. We're talking the big L, after all."
Ulrich is a bright spot in the painful group g
microunderstanding. He runs the session as a ben
tor, neither encouraging nor condescending, follow
tested path to discovery: intellect proposes and
disposes. He fills the chalkboard with As, Ts, Gs, C
helices, decoding boxes, templates, diamonds, tri
194
model short of hex signs. To one beautiful sc

a flaw when it rolls belly-up against experimen
chief shakes his head and pronounces stoically,
Shipwrecked on shoals of fact."
The members compete to win the next st
Ulrich makes them each sense that all of their
on the resulting paper. Still, Ressler declines
private bias on how to begin cracking the c
Reticence is not an issue, or fear of bruised ego
session at the public trading post, the small
he now possesses might get lost in the hypot
weeks, after he learns the ropes, he'll lay o
method so new that he himself can't formulate
As Ulrich smoothly wraps up the Blue Sky s
turns to Gray and Partly Cloudy, someone slip
More spectral number theory, a spidery, nin
hand.
Dr. Ressler
Dismissals of verse notwithstanding, Fearless Leader
harbors a closet predisposition to literature. I'll wager Ulrich
has contracted Poe's Gold Bug. Communicable, I gather. J.K.
The syntax is the sequel to his earlier exercise in cryptogra

phy. But this note, on second reading, makes at least marginal
sense. No need for letter substitution. Yet the words resist ul
timate understanding. It doesn't occur to him, as the session
breaks up, to ask JK herself what she means. He watches her
leave the room and looks again at the note, the first he's received
in twenty years of school. Dr. Koss glides across the lab and out
the door. Monk Mendel's chief lesson returns from first-year ge
netics: that rift between genotype and phenotype. Surfaces lie.
At night, back in his bachelor and still unfurnished flat,
Ressler lies in his bunk, wrapped in the barracks walls, the
cradling vacancy of his adopted town. The day's stimulation
prevents sleep. He runs through the proposed structure, which
is entrancing all biology except Woytowich and a few lone
holdouts. The spiral molecular staircase two paired railings
sinuously twisting around one another, eternally unmeeting
snakes caught in a caduceus-becomes, in his fueled brain,
195
RICHARD POWERS
the stairs of Robeson's spiritual: Jacob's ladder

highway to higher kingdoms. Angels descending
in two solid, frozen, opposing columns. Four k
twist along the golden stairs-bright angels and
sexes. Four angel varieties freeze in two adjac
and down the staircase, each stuck on a step that
its exact counterpart. Every bright man opposite
Every bright woman, a dark man. Fitful in his bun
in the unappeasable model-making urge. Four
to signify DNA's four bases: thymine, cytosin
guanine. Jacob's helical staircase ladder conjured o
strand of nucleic acid.
How indispensable models have been to date
Crick did the trick with tin shapes, interlo
pieces that refused to combine in any configurat
with the data except the spiral staircase. The
snips of accordion paper, now an industry leg
industry joke until laughter was hushed by re
Pauling's offspring-molecular spheres and d
in classrooms, raising a race of clear-eyed s
innovative exhalations already warm Ressler's
models agree: life science, to advance at all, canno
and hope to pull it apart into underpinning little
with the constituents and tease them into a struc
with observation. Cyfer needs a model as simp
baby blocks, a breathtaking Tinkertoy indistingui
thing it imitates.
Four years ago Ressler, along with every
haplotype, noticed that the double-spiral stair
two identical informational queues. The ascendi
complements the descending stream. Wholly r
angel sequence can be entirely re-created from th
men, dark men, bright women, dark women:
pair uniquely mated, each half of the staircas
same message. There it was in Crick and Watso
summary: "It has not escaped our notice tha
pairing we have postulated immediately sugge
copying mechanism for the genetic material."
in each half-stair must somehow be capable of
196
their proper mates out of the angelic bouillabaisse. Chem

lightning, sundering the staircase down its middle, unzi
it, creates two severed parades, each capable of re-crea
the entire, original ladder. Ressler, in his bunk, has the
sucked out of him by the ingenuity, the rightness of
long molecular chain, stupefyingly massive but obeying
chemical requirements, somehow lucks upon viability
fundamental, self-replicating machine.
Stairway replication, an inanimate molecule's ability
double, is just the surface of the proliferate miracle. Someh
incomprehensibly tortuously simply, coded in permutation
four bases alone, is all the sequence needed to conduct the f
angel choir. On this dream of spiral ladders, he lulls himself
brief, shallow sleep. Rest does not last long, nor does he
refreshed. He is back in the stacks at opening, armed with
tip-off Jeanette Koss has passed him. He came to Illinois to
the nucleic code. To date the only triplets he's gone up agai
are Dewey Decimal. He looks up her clue in the card catal
Poe's "The Gold Bug." Mystery, suspense: a story in a tho
anthologies. It's been years since he's read any fiction excep
Oppenheimer charges. But the library jump-table leads h
813 as easily as if he were a regular.
Squatting between two metal shelves, Ressler loses him
in the adventure. Discovery-a piece of heated parchm
reveals secret writing. Pictograph of baby goat identifies au
as Captain Kidd, language of cipher as English. Simple le
frequency and word-pattern trick leads scholar to pira
treasure. But directions to treasure are themselves a co
algorithm for unburying. Two men and blackfella serv
applying human ingenuity, measured paces, and plumb l
crack third-level mystery and uncover wealth beyond wi
dreams. Only at the story's end does he emerge, shake off
fictional spell. "Gold Bug" is the ticket all right; he's com
the right place.
If he understands Dr. Koss's warning, Ulrich may be
danger of confusing the message of base-string sequences w
their translation mechanism. Bulling through frequency co
and base-order mapping, searching the impenetrable archiv
nucleic rungs, will never reveal a simple correspondence
197
RICHARD POWERS
equating sequences with hair color, hand length,

The game is immensely bigger; much more than
at stake. To search for sequence-substitution, to
gold bugs, would be tantamount to learning a f
armed with only a translating dictionary. Th
no further than a refinement of Morgan's en
generations: chromosome bump X produces whi
of one name for the other, no more than a m
individual messages without ever getting fluen
tongue.
The catch they are after is not what a particular string of
DNA says, but how it says it. For the first time, they might do
more than wedge open the door. They must throw wide open
the means of molecular articulation, master, with the fluency
of native speakers, a language sufficiently complex and flexible
to speak into existence the inconceivable commodity of self
speaking. The treasure in Poe's tale is not the buried gold but
the cryptographer's flicker of insight, the trick, the linguistic
key to unlocking not just the map at hand but any secret writing.
Ressler must bring the team to see that they are up against some
thing considerably larger than the pleasures of the Sunday cross
word, fitting a few letters into empty boxes. Not the limited game
of translation but the game rules themselves. Sprawled between
the girders of the 800s, in the summer of his twenty-fifth year, he
gets his first hint of the word game he is up against. He must latch
onto a language that can articulate its own axioms, a technique
that can generate-in the effortless idiom it models-endlessly
extensible four-letter synonyms for Life.
A knock at the barracks on another summer's evening,

and Ressler hasn't a clue as to who it is. It can't
be Dulles complaining about the noise; Ressler hasn't
played Robeson for days. He throws the door open. Out where
the welcome mat should be, incomprehensibly, stands short
sleeved, full-bodiced Dr. Koss. Jeanette enters. Ressler, agape,
neither prevents nor invites her. Her eyes trace an astonished
arc over the monkish sparsity of the room. Only when she leans
against a wall in a girlish slump does he collect himself. "What
in the world are you doing here?"
198
She takes the Ur-punch line, jutting one arm ov

and slithering a side step. "The samba." Slowly, sad
"When you can't reproduce 'cause you've lost al
it's your birthday," to the tune of "That's Amore,"
apparent damage on the sense of the chord prog
stops and examines Ressler, as if the burden of expl
on him.
"But it's not my birthday. Not yet." He feels his idiocy the
instant he objects.
"No? Damn! And all the numerology worked out perfectly!
I guess it's back to triplet coding. Here. I brought you a
present anyway." She holds out a wrapped phonograph record
tentatively, reluctant to give it up. Not knowing what else to
do, Ressler unwraps it. It's a two-year-old recording of Bach's
Goldberg Variations in a debut performance by a pianist who
has the bad taste to be both as Canadian as Avery and younger
than Ressler. "I'm sorry if the surface is ground to death. But I
thought you deserved something better in life than bobby-soxers
and Britten."
Ressler flinches at Koss's inside knowledge. He stands
paralyzed, unable to extricate himself. "I don't understand.
What is this?"
"It's a record," she replies, with a pouty, apologetic smile at
having to do all the vaudeville. "You put it on that machine and
music comes out." She lowers her arm, still thrust in pseudo
samba, and sits cross-legged on the floor. She tilts her head and
lets her face go sunbather slack. Ressler considers his options:
deterrence has failed, and it is too late for a preemptive strike.
He goes to the phono; for the first time since he bought her,
Olga spins without suggestion of complicity. He removes the
record from its worn cardboard, with difficulty finding side one.
"Is your husband dropping by, too?" He tries for a neutral lilt.
"My husband doesn't care much for music. What Mr. Koss
has no interest in could fill symposia." She faces him, equal parts
coy and ashamed. His first good look at her: she is more juvenile,
lighter than in profile. Suddenly she gesticulates for him to hurry
and get the music on: Why else do you think I've come all the
way here?
Nothing to do except release track one. He touches the
199
RICHARD POWERS
needle to the Goldberg aria. The bare octave,

of the unfolding triad, initiate a process th
his insides for life. Transparent tones, surprisi
precisely the right state of confusion and readin
urgent, private, concealed message. The pleasur
subtle, statistical sequence of expectation and
only dimly feel. But the first measure annou
heartbreaking proportions. What he fails to le
notes tonight will lodge in his lungs until they st
If the night is complete and the train of n
with certainty, even formal symmetry will grow
as a living thing. The fragmented melody, the de
coming from the speakers, the lights across th
many ships' distress signals), the pile of slip-delin
swelling in the corner like an unassailable fairy-ta
the foreign woman sitting on the floor not thre
everything aims this moment, indistinguishable
at his heart. This fluke, beautiful assortment:
alone. Certainly a message; the sentient music
that explicit. A messenger, undeniably, at th
sender. No sponsor. Only notes, vertically perfec
inevitable.
Prompted by the aria's first octave, he at once
an electron microscope at a moment he will ne
succeed in re-creating. How can he say what he h
a melody (it can't quite be called that), ornament
stately, frilly way into timeless irrelevance. He h
else, something substantial, underneath the perio
line as patterned as the orbit of seasons, fueled by
burning as the core of a star.
While the right hand tentatively ascends and t
descends in nothing more ingenious than a ma
could be simpler? Four scale-steps descend from
by three rising tones before a temporary ret
aria has traveled only eight measures, but Res
further. He skids across epochs, shaking time
line insinuates itself through the most unassumi
measures imaginable: a third group of four notes
a fourth, these eight together asserting a meta-ech
200
eight. This four-by-four mega-measure is in t

further sixteen-a perfect hierarchy where e
is reflected at a higher level. A pulse, a row
square sprung from four letters: its Pythagore
the hint of proliferation, a celestial blowou
possibilities.
The man, until this moment incapable of he
song on Summer Slumber Party derives fro
V progression as "Red River Valley," can he
pattern potential beyond telling: answers and
oppositions, expansions, contractions, dissonan
He hears all these hiding in a tune so simple it
even be called a tune. And the variations haven
How can a haphazard nubbiness of gro
synthetic polymer, read and converted into eq
current, passed in turn through an electromag
speaker paper, sucking it back and forth in a
sets up a sympathetic vibration in thin skin m
electrical nerve-bursts, simulate not only all t
the orchestra but this most cerebrally self-con
hammer-struck, vibrating string? God only k
string vibrations themselves code for. But t
something, he's sure. And if he lets what these
back into the obscurity they have momentarily
from, a tract of unsuspected signal will disapp
with this woman when she stands up to leave.
Underneath the graceful aria's surface
stripped-down fragment, a moment not ev
melody not yet the essential one. The real
that will pass with that trivial bass line throu
varying but constant mutations, is the accomp
and remorse, Ressler and Koss alone in this r
a mere crystal, periodic, irregular, growing in
back into the imprecision of memory and for
premonition, into the logical consequence of its
unsuspected adulthood. At the center of that s
of harmony, this moment leaves its fossil i
and a woman, unwitting particulars of a speci
in the stillness before the historical calamit
201
RICHARD POWERS
and preserve them, pressed in stratigraphy, here

floor.
Tone-deaf, he hears, he is inside it. In its final four bars,
the bass makes its way back to origin. But at the moment when
it must land on the octave, the delinquent melody pulls one
last shock. It hits and hangs on the note below, a suspended
dissonance that threatens to spread perpetually. He wonders if
the chord will ever come home.
A change comes over Dr. Koss, too, with the music. No
longer the skittish girl filled with punch lines. Legs crossed,
neck arched, head tilted, she sheds the sunbather and becomes
a mater dolorosa. At the aria's end, Ressler, scared by how much
empty space has flooded into K-53-C, moves next to her. His
entree to music is exactly this: wanting, just this once, without
compromise, to close the curve of this woman's body, the cell
surface he has not been able to forget since the moment she took
his head in her hands and toweled it dry.
He does not know what she is doing here, why she inflicts
this tune on him. She has no personality but the one she adopts
this instant. He needs from her precisely this refusal to dissolve
into specifics. Whatever he suspects about the motive for her
visit disappears somewhere in the thirty-two measures. They
sit through the first fifteen variations, rooted a foot from one
another. When side one ends, they listen to a few revolutions
of dull scratching before either moves. Ressler gets up, flips the
record. The fifteen feet of floorboard to the plastic phonograph
elongates epically. He fumbles with the cartridge, overwhelmed
by aboriginal wonder at the device. All devices.
When he comes back, Koss reaches without looking and
puts her arm around his shoulders. She touches his bone
blade without hope or threat or promise. A completely
unencumbered, uncompromised, just-to-be-touching touch. His
shoulders support her arm as if they have known each other
since the start. As if they know each other now. As if anyone
ever knows the first thing about another.
The piece proceeds, with the modesty of the monumental, to
launch an investigation into everything the aria, by permutation,
can conceivably become. After an immense journey whose
contours he only darkly traces, the piece ends note-for-note as it
202
began: da capo. Once more, from the head, the

of sarabande, fleshed out upon four unfolding
the music stops, they continue to touch im
arabesques on in silence, not knowing the
sinusoidal pulse of the needle scratching the
is surf interrogating the continental coast.
variations, the signal, now dampened, disperse
A voice calls him back to the world's ind
you ill? You look febrile." She places the bac
his forehead. He burns to beg her to use that a
instinctive to women: upper-lip thermometer.
would elude even this most heat-sensitive ga
hotel, plans lost in complexity, night, love's ac
September, memory, fever beyond telling.
He does not look at her. In another mome
agreement and walk to the door. Their arms li
They turn toward one another awkwardly, a g
separating their mutually unreadable faces.
ended, wrong: he wants only to be rid of her
calamity. She reaches out, straightens his co
me. Which one of us knows the first thing a
after?
"I would like, very much," he begins, but breaks off in an
undeserved sense of well-being. Warm air coming off the lawn,
the light of his unfurnished army barracks at his back. How cut
off, without consequence, they both are from the lights leading
out to the black fields on the edge of town. He stands surrounded
by danger, experience. "I want . . ." He stops again, unable for
the life of him to remember what he wants so badly. The name
of the thing.
"I know," she giggles, diminished again to teenaged flirt,
laughing off the game they have begun, the awful eroticism.
There, between them, dispersing as she beats him to the word
goodbye, is the ladder's base, the replicating heart of the coding
problem. What could be simpler? I know; I could name that tune
in four notes.
203

56778we Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder

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56778we Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder

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Jean Stein

We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder

Fo m the window of a wandering Greyhound, Stuart

Fortune extracts the man at Indianapolis, a

Stagnant backwaters are the most fecund.

He remains horizontal for days, boning up

Dear St u,lJuly 16, 195

and twisting alleys. If the stink of binding paste did

steak aside, Ressler has never enjoyed cutting i

A clear return to native tongue. Grouping by three

uncanny Eleanor Roosevelt impersonation, Dr

in less than a month, he's already saddled hims

evangelical minister's voice spreading spirituals fr

insistence that we sing ourselves into a furt

Rearguard, he runs through the lexical comb

To this cross list, he adds the crucial test

I f the great debate of the '40s raged ove

Gershwinning ways, are locked in dispute ab

speculation. Ressler's first day at school is a day to i

model short of hex signs. To one beautiful sc

The syntax is the sequel to his earlier exercise in cryptogra

the stairs of Robeson's spiritual: Jacob's ladder

their proper mates out of the angelic bouillabaisse. Chem

equating sequences with hair color, hand length,

A knock at the barracks on another summer's evening,

She takes the Ur-punch line, jutting one arm ov

needle to the Goldberg aria. The bare octave,

eight. This four-by-four mega-measure is in t

and preserve them, pressed in stratigraphy, here

began: da capo. Once more, from the head, the

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